Getting Started

Prerequisites for the X Livestream API: an X developer app, OAuth credentials (OAuth 2.0 recommended, OAuth 1.0a also supported), user permissions, and an RTMP encoder.

To use the Livestream API, you need the following:

1. X developer app

   An X developer app (OAuth client) to authenticate requests.

2. OAuth credentials

   All Livestream endpoints support both OAuth 2.0 and OAuth 1.0a. OAuth 2.0 is the recommended method: request the broadcast.read and broadcast.write scopes at minimum, which cover most operations. OAuth 1.0a is still accepted for existing integrations. Store your credentials securely.

3. User permissions

   The broadcasting account must have permission to go live. Protected/private X accounts are not permitted to create broadcasts.

4. RTMP encoder

   You will need an external encoder (e.g., ffmpeg or similar) to push video to the RTMPS ingest URL provided by a stream source.

Finding your user ID

The /2/sources and /2/broadcasts routes take the user from the access token, so you don’t need the user ID to call them.

The deprecated /2/users/:user_id/sources and /2/users/:user_id/broadcasts routes, which will be removed on January 1, 2027, require the numeric X user ID from the access token to exactly match the :user_id in the URL path. Mismatches are rejected with HTTP 400 Bad Request. See the migration guide to move off these routes.

If you need the user ID, a common way to obtain the user ID is to call GET /2/users/me using the same credentials you will use for the Livestream endpoints.

When using OAuth 1.0a, the numeric user ID is also the prefix of the access token, before the - — e.g. 172483972-xxxxx → 172483972 — so you can avoid an extra request.

Example response from GET /2/users/me:

{
  "data": {
    "id": "172483972",
    "name": "Example User",
    "username": "example",
    "verified": true,
    "verified_type": "blue",
    "subscription_type": "Premium",
    "public_metrics": { ... },
    "profile_image_url": "..."
  }
}

Next steps

Authentication

How to sign requests with OAuth 2.0 or OAuth 1.0a.

Typical workflow

The end-to-end flow from source to live broadcast.